黄仁勋绯闻风波

In all my years on the computer, I never thought I’d see graphics cards and an international sex scandal in the same story. But this week, The Times broke the news that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker NVIDIA and one of the most important figures in AI and tech, has been having an affair with a top executive at a Singaporean data center company who also happens to be an alleged Chinese spy. Her company was reportedly illegally funneling advanced NVIDIA chips to Chinese companies. Huang remains in place atop NVIDIA, which is launching its own internal investigation, and the new Democratic Congress could follow with one of its own, especially since President Trump has apparently been aware of the allegations and unwilling to intervene for a year.

I love a spy story, and I won’t pretend that the sex scandal part of this story isn’t a huge draw for me. But I’m also fascinated that this lurid tale of international intrigue is all about graphics card trade policy. This is the quintessential 21st-century spy story. We’re not talking about troop movements; no one’s stealing top-secret microfilm. Jensen Huang wears a leather jacket, not a tuxedo.

What we have instead is a tale of executive hubris, Chinese holding companies, export controls, and, of course, a race to create the world’s most powerful and important technology. Because this is such a rich and fascinating intersection of our interests, we had to talk about it as soon as possible. Today, on what we’re calling an emergency episode, I’m joined by technology journalist Stephen Witt, who literally wrote the book on Jensen Huang and NVIDIA, to talk about these revelations. How did someone so powerful become an international espionage target and fall for it? Why did it take so long for this story to come out, and who leaked it? How much of what Huang has been saying as a leader of the tech industry is now going to be called into question? And is it possible that this story is dramatic enough that it could pop the bubble we’re all so worried about? I’m Max Read. This is Hard Fork.

Joining me from a hotel room in Singapore is Stephen Witt, author of last year’s book, The Thinking Machine, a biography of Jensen Huang and NVIDIA. He’s going to help me try to wrap my head around this. Welcome to Hard Fork, Stephen.

Thanks for having me.

Of course. What have your last 24, 48 hours been like as this story has been breaking?

I’ve been on every news network, I think, in the world. They’ve invited me on, and I’m having to decline invitations that, at any other time, I would have been overjoyed to get. It’s 3:30 in the morning where I am, and I’m still working. It’s nuts. What a story.

It seems to me that there are 3 big revelations in this unfolding story, at least things that were revelations to me. One is that Jensen Huang was having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Two, his affair partner’s company, Megaspeed, is suspected of funneling NVIDIA chips to China in contravention of U.S. export bans. And three, there’s a series of things we’ve now learned about the Trump administration’s knowledge of this and possible intervention in Commerce Department investigations.

Yes.

How much of this was revelatory to you? You’ve spent a lot of time reporting on and talking to Jensen Huang, and thinking about him. How much of it was surprising?

1. The Smuggling Was Known

Everyone knew that the Malaysia data center thing was a cutout to smuggle chips into China. That had been reported by The Times over a year ago, and even before that, people understood that Malaysia didn’t have a big AI development program. If 10 or 15% of NVIDIA’s revenue was coming from Malaysia—

Mm-hmm.

—really, that meant those chips were being distributed to China in one way or another.

Yeah.

Some people think they were actually brought to the data center, had the labels removed and replaced, and then sent directly into mainland China as a real smuggling operation. Others thought maybe the data center was being used by Chinese assets in some way. But that was pretty well known. The affair thing—there were whispers. It wasn’t a complete stunner. I had heard stuff about this going into this summer in particular, and had been trying to find this, but I didn’t have access to the thing that I guess really broke the story, which was White House intelligence.

Mm-hmm.

And this was the surprising thing, getting to the third part. Although this is a story about NVIDIA, and although it’s a story about smuggling and affairs and stuff, I think Jensen found himself on the wrong side of the China hawks here. I think that’s where a lot of the reporting on this went. It went to the China hawks who had an ax to grind with Jensen.

I want to talk about that in a moment. But before we get there, I think one of the big reasons this is a big story is that we don’t have that many examples of CEOs who are as powerful as Jensen Huang. Can you briefly describe his role at NVIDIA and in the greater AI ecosystem, and explain why it’s uniquely damaging for him to be involved in a scandal like this?

2. Nvidia’s Key Man Risk

Jensen is the founder, CEO, and basically king of NVIDIA. He’s been in that role for 30-plus years. NVIDIA’s an unusual organization. Typically, in a corporate org chart, you’ll have the CEO, and then a second layer of management, maybe 6 to 8 people, who assist the CEO in various roles. That doesn’t exist at NVIDIA. There’s Jensen, there’s nobody in the second tier, and then there are 60 people who report directly to him.

It’s a very unusual arrangement. NVIDIA is Jensen to a degree that I’ve almost never seen at any other corporation, except maybe some of Elon Musk’s stuff. It’s really just this one guy in control, managing and running everything. So if he’s compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can’t do his job, that’s uniquely damaging for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA has grown so large selling AI hardware, selling microchips in particular into data centers, that it’s now a linchpin of the American economy. There’s this giant key-man risk, not just for NVIDIA, but actually, to some extent, for the entire U.S. economy around this guy. So this is a painful one for U.S. markets. It’s very painful for NVIDIA. Jensen’s judgment has to be called into question. This guy was bulletproof for the last decade.

Mm-hmm.

His stock did nothing but go up, and every call he made was right.

Yeah.

Now it doesn’t look that way.

I understand this is going to take a little while to play out, but given his importance, as you’ve described it, would you be surprised if he was ousted?

I would be surprised if the board fired him.

Mm-hmm.

I don’t think that would be in the best interest of NVIDIA shareholders.

Right.

That’s their job, right? I think that would make NVIDIA stock go down a lot, so I don’t think the board will do that. The real risk to Jensen comes from what Democrats and Republicans are both asking for, which is congressional hearings and congressional testimony.

There are a number of ways this can go wrong, but probably the most important one is that it’s so obvious to anyone looking at it for one second that these data centers in Malaysia were not for Malaysian people. They were for Chinese AI developers to get around these export restrictions. Jensen could maybe play dumb and not understand that in an abstract way, but if he’s sleeping with the head of the company, he can’t play dumb anymore, right?

Right.

He must have known what was going on. And that’s against the law, right? This creates enormous legal liability both for NVIDIA—they might have to pay a massive fine—and even for Jensen himself. The Republicans are asking him to testify behind closed doors. That’s actually positive for Jensen because it’s less embarrassing.

Mm-hmm.

I think the Democrats are going to hold their own, or attempt to hold their own, inquiries and hearings once they take control, and I imagine those will be public.

Mm-hmm.

It’s going to be a tricky situation for him. I just don’t know how he can say, “Oh, I didn’t know that Malaysia was a cutout. I didn’t know about this woman.” And this is the thing that shocks me: It’s terrible that Jensen had an affair, but these things do happen in the course of human life. I’m so shocked that Jensen had an affair with this specific woman—

Mm-hmm.

…who is just a walking red flag. She had no background in computer science, as far as anyone can tell.

Mm-hmm.

And suddenly she’s running this data center operation that’s a front. This woman is a smuggler. To begin a romantic relationship with someone like that just shows an almost self-destructive amount of poor judgment. I can’t believe nobody warned him, but the thing about Jensen is he’s very headstrong and doesn’t listen to any advice.

Yeah. Let me ask: You have literally written the book on Jensen. You spent a lot of time in his head. What do you think was going on there? Was it just a total lapse in judgment?

Yeah. Pure hubris. I don’t think there was some strategic thing he was doing. What do you think was going on in his head?

Right.

He fell for it.

Yeah.

He got played. He got played. That’s all you can say.

Yeah. To return to the question of Jensen’s role at NVIDIA: If he does end up having to leave the company down the road, is there a succession plan in place? As you say, he’s the king. Who’s the heir?

I asked him, “Who is your successor?” And he’s like, “Nobody.” He didn’t have any kind of plan personally. He never personally selected or named any kind of successor. Again, hubris. Maybe he thought he was immortal.

Mm-hmm.

I put this question to the board back in 2024, and they said, “Oh, well, we’ve looked at some candidates.” One of those candidates was a guy named Jay Puri. He just retired.

Mm-hmm.

He’s in his 70s, so I don’t think it’s going to be him. I think Jensen’s going to fight this one as hard as he can.

Yeah.

And Jensen is a fighter. He’s a knife fighter.

Mm-hmm.

I actually think he will probably survive this, believe it or not. The thing that would bring him down, as they say, is congressional hearings. I don’t know. Never say never. I don’t think the board will get rid of him.

Mm.

The board is comprised of some of the original founders of Nvidia, guys like Jen-Hsun Huang, who have been there since day one, since 1993.

Mm-hmm.

Jen-Hsun Huang has something like $2 billion to $3 billion worth of Nvidia stock. He’s not going to do anything to damage the company.

Yeah. I know that 2 of Jensen’s kids and his son-in-law work at Nvidia. As far as you know, they’re not being groomed to take over his position at some point?

Yeah, so this is an interesting question. Jensen always presented to me and to others this total family-man image. He talked about his wife a lot and how much he loved her. They’ve been together since he was 17 years old. They got married in their early 20s. If they get divorced, she may become one of the wealthiest women in America independently, like MacKenzie Scott.

His kids are close. He keeps them at the company: Madison and Spencer. But they don’t have technical backgrounds. Spencer studied photography. Madison went to culinary school. Whoever runs Nvidia, whoever the CEO is, has to be a world-class computer scientist in addition to being a businessperson.

Mm-hmm.

They have to be one of the best computer scientists alive, which is what Jensen is. He’s in the National Academy of Engineering. He’s got a master’s in electrical engineering. You talk to people, and they’re like, “Yeah, his computer science skills are excellent.” So they can be present for the transition. They will inherit a large number of shares, but I don’t think they can run the company.

Madison married this guy Nico Caprez earlier this year. I think it was about a month ago, in Hawaii, so Jensen has him as a son-in-law as well. He’s been promoted rapidly within the company. We’ll see if he actually has a role to play.

Yeah. Let’s turn to the political question here. I think it’s fair to say that Jensen is Trump’s favorite CEO, or certainly one of his favorite CEOs.

I think he was.

The president says he will take him on his upcoming trip to China. Here’s the Trump quote: “I haven’t heard he’s done anything wrong. He dealt with somebody, but so does everybody else. I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it. No, you can’t do that with people. He has done an amazing job for our country.” That’s the president of the United States on the man who was having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

How did Jensen get into this position in the Trump administration? And furthermore, how did he become such an important figure in the AI sector in general?

3. Jensen Wins Trump’s Ear

Yeah, this is the amazing thing. When I was talking to Jensen in 2024, he had no interest in politics. He had never made a political donation, and he had never endorsed a political candidate or any policy. A couple of things related to exports, but very little. He was not a political guy, and he didn’t even attend Trump’s inauguration.

Mm.

He was in Taiwan while Sam and all the rest of them were behind Trump in that show of power at the inauguration. But he got Trump’s ear, and my impression is that he kind of became Trump’s friend through this really shameless approach of flattery.

Jensen is an engineer, and what he told me is that he thinks about everything as an engineering problem. You study the inputs, look at the outputs, and then modify the inputs to control the system until you get the outcome that you want. Trump has this bottomless need for validation, and Jensen supplies that to him. He just shamelessly kisses his butt. I think this makes Trump like him. And the other thing is that Jensen’s a winner, right? Trump always—

Mm-hmm.

—wants to be around winners. For most of this year, Nvidia was the single most valuable company in the world, maybe in human history, and so this made Trump and Jensen want to be close to each other. I think Jensen understands Trump at a certain level—how to program him. Ego isn’t going to get in the way for Jensen the way it might for another tech executive.

Right. Let’s talk about Jensen’s stance on China, because that’s important to the story on a couple of different levels. He’s been a pretty outspoken advocate for selling his own chips directly to China, in contravention of U.S. export restrictions on those chips, which have been put into place to try to slow down China’s own AI development. Tell me a little bit about his stance, how he came to it, and how he’s advocated for it.

4. The China Sales Argument

You know, I was always a little surprised by it myself, but there’s really a great business case for it, right? China’s going to have a massive data center build-out that looks just like the U.S.’s, and when they do, they’re going to fill that all with computing equipment. So that’s another entire data center build-out that he could supply, which presumably would double the value of his company. It’s a very straightforward P&L reason that Jensen wants this.

I think the justification is: If we don’t sell this to them, they will build it. They will build their own AI hardware stack, and then we’ll have to compete against that, and that will be very challenging for us, and we might lose. Jensen is genuinely very afraid of that.

Mm.

That’s a theme that has gone all the way back to the beginning of his career: the fear that his equipment, even in the video game days, would get cloned by Chinese competitors and sold at a fraction of the cost, and he would go out of business. Certainly, that’s the history of hardware, so it’s normal that he would be afraid of that and would be looking to prevent that.

What poisons the discourse now is this romantic relationship. Are you saying this because you believe it, or are you saying this because you’re entangled with a foreign intelligence asset who is manipulating you? I think that narrative is probably not true. I think Jensen would say this anyway, but his credibility is zero. He can never talk about China or export restrictions again without sounding like a fool, like an intelligence play has happened to him.

Like a patsy, basically.

Yeah, precisely. Like a stooge.

Yeah.

So I think that argument has gone out the window. I imagine Nvidia will, in short order, not be able to sell anything to China ever again.

Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about what you brought up before: the possibility that Jensen’s enemies within the Trump administration had gotten their knives out for him. Tell me why you think that, and who those enemies would be.

5. China Hawks Target Jensen

There were people on the right who did not like this. It’s not that they didn’t like Jensen; they didn’t like his soft take on China. They didn’t like that he was pro-free trade with China. These are the China hawks on the right, guys like Peter Thiel, guys like Palmer Luckey, and in particular Marco Rubio, who’s been a longtime China hawk and is also Trump’s Secretary of State. Rubio actually wasn’t permitted inside China for a while because his statements were so hawkish.

The U.S. intelligence community got to this story because they had some kind of wiretap on the woman, Alice, and Jensen showed up in that wiretap. Marco Rubio prepared a memo showing that it was Jensen and shared that with Trump, and then Trump took no action.

Mm.

I imagine at least part of the reason we’re now hearing about this in the press is that someone in the White House wanted to reduce Jensen’s influence over the president. I think there was an element here of the China hawks taking back control of the narrative and of power within the White House.

6. How the Chips Moved

Let’s talk about the chips and the supply chain. The details of exactly what’s happening in the Megaspeed case are complicated, but it’s something like Nvidia is selling chips to the U.S. arm of a Chinese company, which then sells them on to Megaspeed.

Yes.

Is this a normal arrangement?

No.

I think you sort of answered this question before.

No, this is how you smuggle something. You establish a dummy corporation in a different country, and then you— This is why import-export can be a shady business sometimes, right?

Mm-hmm.

There was a case earlier this year where guys at Supermicro were taking boxes full of Nvidia equipment. They’d take a hair dryer, blow the packaging label off, peel it off, and replace it with a fake packaging label.

With Megaspeed, the details are still a little fuzzy. One thing that may have happened is that they were using the data centers with dummy servers.

Mm.

The Nvidia equipment would show up, and they would install it, quote-unquote, but actually install other nonfunctional equipment in the data center to make it look like a functional data center. Then you wheel the Nvidia equipment out the back door and cart it off to China, to some secret location.

Right.

That’s one thing that seems to have been happening. Even without that, Megaspeed seems to be downstream of Alibaba, which is—

Mm.

—the Chinese eBay, and it seems like Alibaba was the main customer for Megaspeed’s products. It depends on how you read the law, but I think that’s in violation of the export restrictions as well, because you can’t use these fronts. Lawmakers are aware that this sort of thing exists. There are a couple of ways to get around it. This year, I’ve heard that Nvidia has really cracked down on this.

Perhaps recognizing the political liability of these sales, Nvidia is really forcing data centers to make sure they have legitimate customers who are not in China. I’m in Singapore right now. This is just across the bridge; it’s about 30 minutes away from me.

Yeah.

As is typical with these facilities, you can’t access them at all. They’re surrounded by gates and security. No one’s allowed in or out, so it’s really hard to know what’s going on in there.

Right.

As I say, I think it defies imagination that Jensen would not understand what—

Yeah.

—what’s going on here. It just is not plausible.

Let me ask: it’s the Commerce Department that’s, for the most part, investigating. If you’re installing dummy servers in your fake data center, are Commerce Department investigators stopping by to check on those? How does the U.S.—

Well, they’re out of Malaysia, right? This is the thing: there’s only so much they can do outside of the United States. I think they’re probably guaranteeing that the original point of sale, or the original destination where the thing is delivered, is this data center in Malaysia. They’re real; they exist.

Right.

There’s not nothing there.

Right.

But once it goes in, the U.S. has only very limited authority and insight into what might happen in Malaysia. From there, there’s not much they can do.

I’m not quite sure how to ask this, but is Megaspeed a real company? It’s not a fake company or a cutout or anything?

It appears to be. It’s a great question. I’m not sure, but it appears to have been formed in 2023. In 2023, Nvidia announced that they were a preferred cloud partner, meaning, “We’re going to prefer selling our equipment to this company in Malaysia.” They have facilities, big data centers that seem to use a lot of power. They built something here, so it’s not completely phony.

It seems like people use their computing resources and pay them for it. It is a real company in that sense. It’s just who’s using it, who’s paying for it, and how legitimate any of it is are open questions.

I’m talking with Stephen Witt. You are, in fact, in Singapore. What’s the reaction been like on the ground? Is everybody in Singapore talking about this?

Oh, yeah. The reaction is, “What took you guys so long?” The authorities here in Singapore had been busting smuggling rings going back to 2024. They were aware that at least some of this was happening. Johor is just across the way, and a lot of people who live in Singapore work in Malaysia. Malaysia has become a data center hub, outside of Megaspeed. This should be said.

Right.

There’s legitimately a big industry there, and it employs a lot of people. They’re very proud of it. I don’t want to smear them all as part of some kind of criminal conspiracy.

Right.

It’s a real thing. But I think the impression they got was, “What is going on here?” There were a lot of whispers about Jensen and this woman, both inside Nvidia and among people who were working around there. I think people got the impression that there was more to their relationship than simply business, but it’s a hard thing to prove, and I—

Yeah.

I think without a wiretap, which is ultimately what brought him down, how are you going to demonstrate this?

Right. There was a short-seller report back in May.

Yeah.

It’s now been recirculating. It seems to have put some of the pieces together, but it wasn’t able to specifically describe an affair as happening because, as you say, they didn’t have a wiretap themselves.

Yeah. It’s very hard. I think people knew, or at least suspected, that something…

What was going on was his behavior. You see videos of the two of them together, and there’s a kind of awkward body language when they’re together. There are more photographs and videos leaking out. So I imagine if you were part of Jensen’s immediate entourage, you probably had at least a fairly good idea of what was going on. I had heard stray whispers from within Nvidia earlier this year.

Mm.

But I just wasn’t able to find it.

Yeah.

I wasn’t able to track it down. It was a hard story to get, so credit to the Times for getting it.

I’m happy to take that credit as a podcast host. I can’t imagine that trying to honeypot the CEO is the first line of attack for Chinese intelligence services, or the Chinese government in general, trying to accomplish whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. I presume that Nvidia has been a target of infiltration attempts, signals capture, and whatever else you might do. Is that true?

Oh, they all have.

Yeah.

Nvidia, in some ways, is the least valuable target. They’re really going after Anthropic and OpenAI. Trade secrets from Nvidia are pretty valuable, but China can’t actually manufacture what Nvidia manufactures because they can’t get the equipment. So I think with Jensen it’s probably more about an influence campaign.

Mm.

At the time this relationship started, Jensen wasn’t close to Trump. That’s the other thing.

Yeah.

So they probably had some other motive for going after Jensen at first. Then suddenly they’re like, “Oh my God, we were literally in bed with the president’s top tech advisor. This is awesome.” So this was a big win for the Chinese spies. It was like Christmas morning for them, probably.

Yeah, I bet. At the time we’re recording this, Nvidia stock is down, but the market overall is relatively calm.

Yeah.

This is despite the importance and power of the companies we’ve been talking about. Why do you think there isn’t a bigger reaction in the markets over this?

It’s funny. All of the AI infrastructure stocks that make up so much of the market now are actually trading at very cheap valuations. The market thinks that the AI infrastructure play is coming to an end, or that there’s going to be a drawdown in sales in the next couple of years. That’s how the stocks are priced, so maybe some of this was already priced in. The other thing is, what’s bad for Nvidia is actually good for Nvidia’s competitors, specifically AMD, Broadcom, and Google, which are all manufacturing rival microchips. Google in particular has really started to become one of Nvidia’s top rivals. So Nvidia has a number of significant business risks outside of this spy scandal, and I think some of that was priced into the stock as well.

Let me ask you one final question along these lines. Jensen is sort of unique in this moment as a tech CEO, or especially as an AI CEO, in that he’s maybe the least safety-focused—or at least he’s the least afraid of AI as a technology.

Yeah.

It’s almost the opposite of somebody like Dario Amodei, who’s constantly warning of the possible catastrophe. Jensen gave a big interview to my colleague Ezra Klein earlier this year where he made the case that AI is just a tool and we shouldn’t be worrying about it like this. You wrote about this for the opinion section recently. There’s a scene at the end of your book where he sort of yells at you for even pressing him on this belief. So my question is: What happens if AI’s biggest, least afraid booster loses power or credibility, like we’ve been saying? Do policymakers change their sense of what AI is? Does this change the direction of AI development in the future?

Yeah, probably. Jensen’s not the only person who feels this way. Most of Trump’s advisors feel this way. David Sacks certainly feels this way. Marc Andreessen feels the same as Jensen. They all think AI is completely safe and that all this doomerist discourse is disconnected from reality. That’s been a long debate. Jensen believed that long before he ever hooked up with a Chinese spy. This goes back to 2015. But I do think he was probably the most convincing and powerful advocate for that point of view. His point of view is that he’s looking at it from the microchip up. He’s saying, “I have complete control over each individual component here, and if I’m losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it’s an engineering failure, and we know how to fix engineering failures.” I’m sort of parroting his point of view.

Yeah.

From Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they’re looking at it from the top down, and they’re saying, “I don’t know how this thing works. It’s extremely powerful, and I might lose control of it.” So that’s a really different point of view. I think Jensen has lost this one.

Mm.

I’ve noticed even Trump has started to talk a little bit more about, “Well, maybe we’ll regulate it a little bit.” The Democratic wave that was just put into power had a number of reasons behind it, including oil prices. But it seems like voters were very concerned about AI.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think Trump’s point of view, and Jensen’s point of view, is, “No, you don’t understand. If we stop doing this, China wins.”

Mm.

“China takes control of this technology. They are not afraid, and they are not slowing down.” I think that’s the strongest argument against the AI doomer narrative: People out here in Asia—not just China, but Japan and Korea, and Singapore—don’t believe this at all.

Yeah.

They just do not believe this, and you don’t hear a lot of doomers. I never get AI risk questions out here. In the U.S., it’s the most common thing I’m asked. So to some people, it looks like a kind of cultural hysteria, almost like a moral panic.

Yeah. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really enlightening and elucidating conversation. I really appreciate you making the time at 3:30 in the morning in Singapore, from your hotel room.

My pleasure.

The book is The Thinking Machine. It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in one of the most important, and now most talked-about, figures in the AI era. I look forward to reading more of your reporting on this.

Thank you so much.